Pearl River Delta Environmental Governance Ranking Gaps: Monthly Panel Dataset (2019–2024)

This repository provides the city–month panel dataset and replication code for the study on ranking-based incentives and air-quality governance in China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD). The dataset covers nine PRD cities (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing) from 2019-01 to 2024-12 (N = 648). Time is recorded as YYYYMM and city names are in Chinese in the raw file.
Key outcome: ORIGIN, the monthly environmental quality rank in a provincial league table (1 = best, 21 = worst).
Key explanatory variables: four “environmental governance ranking performance gaps” derived from the league table:
(1) PHM and NHM: positive/negative historical gaps versus the city’s own previous-month rank;
(2) PSM and NSM: positive/negative social gaps versus a peer benchmark in the same month.
Controls include per-capita GDP (gdp_pc; 10k RMB), resident population (pop; 10k persons), industrial structure (ind_share; %), local general public budget expenditure (fisc_exp), environmental governance expenditure (env_spend), and an energy-intensity proxy based on industrial electricity use (energy_int). Missing values occur only for env_spend in 48 city-months.
Files: “2019-2024 面板数据.xlsx” contains the full panel (sheet “汇总表”). “code.do” is a Stata do-file that reproduces the main fixed-effects regressions, lag analyses, robustness checks, and marginal-effect plots reported in the paper.